IBM has hammered the final nails into OS/2's coffin. It said that all sales of OS/2 will end on the 23rd of December this year, and support for the pre-emptive multitasking operating system will end on the 31st December 2006.

Moral issues aside, why would you want to use OS/2 except as an oddity?

Isn't that enough reason? :-)

I can actually think of three reasons why it might still have some appeal from a hobbyist perspective:

(1) Using OS/2 *will* a learning experience for someone who has only used Windows, Linux/BSD, or BeOS. The platform represents an approach to the "Desktop OS" problem that really isn't *nix-like or Windows-like at all in most respects, and it has both a strong GUI plus a fairly strong command line and scripting environment with Rexx (and remember, both 4DOS and 4OS2 are legal freeware now so it has two very good shells aside from the bash and zsh ports).

(2) OS/2 is the best DOS juggler in the world. :-) As an environment for running older DOS software multiple DOS versions concurrently, OS/2 is without parallel. Linux with DOSEMU/DOSBox might come close in some ways, but it's really not the same.

(3) If one is lucky and can find a good older software source, there are still enough older programs and such available (between native OS/2 retail/shareware stuff and older 16-bit Windows stuff) to actually turn OS/2 into an incredibly useful platform. I still do almost everything under OS/2 at home except gaming and MIDI stuff. Remember: it's all about the applications. :-)